High Diving

Series: Summer 2024

High Diving 

10 meters above the water. My feet well balanced on the platform, my head raised, I look up at the sky. I’ve repeated this moment a thousand times. At that very moment, everything inside me is empty. The images of the figures to be performed have vanished. The comments on the movements to be made are gone. My temples, throbbing with adrenaline, are forgotten. Even « “I” is no longer there. This is freedom! It’s a moment out of time. Everything is suspended. Not stopped, because there’s something going on, but I can’t say what. And it doesn’t matter. It’s all just there.

“That’s what Dzogchen practice is all about: diving, diving, diving again, diving until there is no more diving.” 

I recently realized that if I had started training for high diving 20 years ago, it was for this very moment. This very special, magical moment, unlike any other. The moment when I’m no longer just a low-cost version of myself, but something infinite, luminous, totally free and immensely present. What an extraordinary sensation! And even that is far from reality.

My coach calls it the primordial nature of mind. In the twilight of my career, at the age of 35, I finally rediscovered – thanks to him – this experience in practicing Great Perfection. I don’t need to jump anymore, I can do everything sitting down. All I have to do is concentrate as I always have, but longer, deeper, without moving and without using other methods. I’ve even been able to put a name to the experience: the flight of the Garuda.That’s what it’s called in the Tibetan world, apparently. The name doesn’t matter, as long as the experience remains and grows. That’s what Dzogchen practice is all about: diving, diving, diving again, diving until there is no more plunging. So I have to say, then, that high diving was a good preparation for the practice of Great Perfection!

In fact, today I’m high diving one last time – and into the Seine in Paris, the most extraordinary feat of all in fact! – to make one last memory that I’ll be able to tell my grandchildren. If I survive the ordeal, that is. Besides, the Olympic Games of Great Perfection don’t happen every day! So, no matter if I’m on the podium or not, no matter if I win or lose, no matter if I get flowers or nettles thrown at me… I don’t want all that anymore – the privilege of age? – I know now that what I’ll take with me into the twilight of my life will be none of these things, but the moments I’ve spent suspended in the void, hovering in the primordial nature of my own luminous, empty and immensely free mind.

Oh, I’m already in the water…

You can read the other articles in the series : Opening ceremony – Nenikekamen!